Download: Roses in the Thornbush: How Marketing Can Leverage the Value of Recruiting
and How Recruiting Can Leverage the Value of Marketing

Hope Springs Eternal(April 16, 2003) --
In the beginning, there was Restrac. The New England born baby (now more than 20
years old and known as Webhire) was a simple database for filing Resumes. The
success of Restrac spawned an alternative years later. That was Resumix. Between
the two, all of the market's needs were covered.

They positioned themselves
like the Yin and Yang of our industry. While Restrac was an ad-hoc, query driven
database, Resumix was a preplanning intensive search technology. The Resumix
view of the world was built on 'structured lexicons', tables of relationships
between words that helped the computer understand the 'meaning' of a resume.

Given the waves of change
over the years, it's hard to remember just how powerful Resumix was.

It was simpler then. Instead
of the broad menu of choices we have today and the sense that one or two of them
are an experiment by the chef, the market had two choices. Either you were a
pre-planning company that invested in upfront consulting or you were an ad-hoc
company that invested in long term operational consulting. The bill was more or
less the same, the approaches light years apart.

In the dot com flurry, both
companies made the same critical sequential mistakes.

As it always happened (and
as it will happen again), technology went through two major shifts during the
evolution of the market. In the late eighties and very early nineties, corporate
computing shifted from mainframes with servers to client-server. This was step
one in the encroachment of personal computers on the mainframe IT Department.

Both Restrac and Resumix
stumbled. The .0 releases of their newly integrated technology failed miserably,
were hard to adopt and threatened the companies' livelihoods. The damage done to
customers and customer relations can not be overstated. While they were busy
fixing the problem, the tech stuff shifted again as the web emerged. All of a
sudden there were real competitors. The two market leaders fell behind (at least
in the development of new business).

Both companies survive
today. With relatively large customer bases and the retained ability to fight
erosion, they are sturdy, weathered enterprises with the sorts of character
you'd expect from war veterans. They are generally quieter and content to grow
at organic rates, given the lessons of the past five years.

Today, Resumix announced
"immediate availability of its flagship Hiring Gateway platform." It's
somehow based on Yahoo technology and somehow leverages that to do stuff. It's a
little hard to understand how Yahoo (you look stuff up there) translates exactly
into Recruiting, but we're open to the idea. The market could use a strongly
positioned alternative.

It was like reading about
the second marriage of an old college chum. We remember the young and earnest
revolutionary who was going to change the world with 'structured lexicons' and a
vision of organizations that all took planning seriously. What made Resumix
great in the first place was the fact that it was a 'change the world' operation
at its core.

We'll take it as a sign that
the market is coming back. We wish them success.